Tony did a Q&A with him as part of the promo for Catalyst and to talk about Seth’s “new” Triibes.com. I put “new” in quotation marks because quite honestly, I’m a bit surprised at the lack of ingenuity from Seth on this one. He started with genius…create a barrier to entry causing everyone that should be there to want to be there. But…then he used a boxed solution (ning.com) for the platform so when I log in I see what I see on every other site. Eh. Hopefully he will surprise me…so far, other than the fact that he’s narrowed down who’s involved which is nice, I’m not overly excited.

Then wander on over to Seth’s blog for a great post about n00bs….but the n00bs part isn’t what caught my attention this did:

Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

It supports my ranting about design being about more than the prettiness (yep that’s a real word), it’s about communication. In fact I am no longer calling what we do church marketing…Holy Cow Creative is a strategic church communications + design studio. We will always take it in that order 1. Communications 2. Design.

• Focus Audience: who are we trying to reach?
• Forum: where can we reach all of them at once?
• Issue: why are we talking to them?
• Accelerators: what helps?
• Barriers: what hurts?
• Hook: how do we ignite their passion?

Notice that she doesn’t start with what it looks like or what style is used. Those are needed things, if it isn’t beautiful people will ignore it. We should be communicating with amazing visuals and those visuals should rest on the foundation of a clear and moving message.

And I’ll add a seventh:

• Proof: what is the story of change?

I add the seventh because often we stop just short of truly effective ministry. It’s not enough to move people emotionally. It’s one thing to move people on a Sunday morning, they may even make the trip to the altar. But as hard as they may have thought it was to walk to that altar, the real challenge is carrying it out in our daily lives. We need to craft our messages and our responses to be those of change. Please continue to bring people to the altar, but don’t forget to send them into the world.

Commitment is essential to excellence within the church. Lack of commitment is why postcards are sent out that say nothing and have no impact. Lack of commitment is why blogs like Church Marketing Sucks exists. Not because they aren’t committed to the ministry, but because they aren’t committed to communication. Why didn’t people show up to your last great outreach, because you weren’t committed to communicating with relevance, impact and originality.

I hope that together we can change that. I look forward to the journey, and hope you’ll join me for the ride!